More On Walsh

Quittin’ TIME
8/26/2009
By AgWeb

If you’ve been by the magazine stand at your local supermarket or library, you’ll note that one of the nation’s major weekly magazines has as this week’s cover story a blistering attack on conventional agriculture. [And I see fellow AgWeb blogger Matt Bogard has beat me to the punch, but as most fighters know, a 1-2 combination is most effective].

The Aug. 21st issue of Time magazine is entitled “the Real Cost of Cheap Food.” What’s mostly notable about the piece is how predictable and derivative it truly is. There is not a single new fact or assertion in the article that hasn’t long been trotted out by the various anti- activists. You know the ones: Anti-large farms, anti-antibiotic use, anti-carnivores, anti-change. In reading through the article, I kept waiting for something really provocative to appear, but in truth, it read like a college newspaper article. By that I mean that the author didn’t really sift his facts or consider whether the source of them was pushing their own agenda. He just threw them all in the article, because (in ironic comparison to the article itself, which says that too much cheap food leads to obesity) stuffing all those criticisms in one story makes for a very fattening diatribe. Read More

I believe that one of the most frustrating part of all of these negative articles being printed about agriculture is that they are nothing but opinion pieces yet they are trying to portray it as a factual, researched piece. And this isn’t even up for debate because Walsh interviewed several people actually involved in food production and yet chose not to tell both sides of the story. This blatant attempt to NOT tell both sides of the story probably speaks towards Walsh’s integrity as a whole and his respect for journalism.